AI Daily: Chinese companies flood market with AI models

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

FLOODING THE MARKET: Since the debut of DeepSeek’s R1, Chinese companies like Baidu (BIDU), Tencent (TCHEY), Ant, and Alibaba (BABA) have been flooding the market with low cost AI services and models, Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai and Yazhou Sun report. In the past two weeks, Chinese companies have rolled out no fewer than 10 major product updates or releases, according to the report. DeepSeek is a Chinese-built large-language open-source model that claims to rival offerings from Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta Platforms (META) but using a much smaller budget.

AI MODEL: Alibaba has released a new artificial intelligence model in its Qwen series that the company says can process text, pictures, audio and video, and is efficient enough to run directly on mobile phones and laptops, Bloomberg’s Edwin Chan reports. The company said it expects that the new model, now publicly available on Hugging Face and GitHub, will be used to build so-called AI agents that can, for example, help a visually impaired person navigate their environment through real-time audio descriptions, the author says.

LEPTON AI ACQUISITION: Nvidia (NVDA) is in advanced talks to buy Lepton AI, a two-year-old startup that rents out servers powered by Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips, in a deal worth several hundred million dollars, according to a person close to the company, The Information’s Kevin McLaughlin and Stephanie Palazzolo report. The move is part of Nvidia’s push into the cloud and enterprise software market, in competition with major cloud providers like Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOGL). Lepton competes with startups like Together AI, in renting out Nvidia GPU servers.